mariakovaleva / madtadpoles Goto Github PK

I am really happy to introduce you game, that was made by group of people from our Polish regional channel on Slack!

Meet the “Mad Tadpoles” (beta) !

Mad Tadpoles is in beta stage now. We are still working on it. If you want to install it on your phone, just download apk file from main catalogue on beta branch on github

Let’s start our short story

Couple of weeks ago we’ve started talking about making something together. I thought about transformating my second project from Udacity Android Basics course – Soccer Score. I made the first prototype of UI. I think it’s easy to guess the rules – it was supposed to be a kind of “game”. One of two players hits the button and the opponent's health points are decreased. Really simple game.

We were discussing about the gameplay and weapons a lot, until @Ola suggested another way: Maybe weapons should be selected randomly? We made a new prototype 😊

During one of our brainstorming sessions, @MalgoskaG (who is a really good illustrator) proposed to change Worms to another, unique characters. That was when Mad Tadpoles came to be.😊 Malgosia's tadpoles are great because they have their own personality. After that, I made a new design of the app based on Tadpoles. After those changes our game was starting to look really professional. When project of our UI was done, Malgosia made general XML layout. She used Constraint Layout which is a new, amazing way to build Android app layouts. She worked a lot with our app graphics and helped with java code too. She shared her experience with Constraint Layout and graphic design with us, so all of us could learn something new. When we had a really good app design (at least in our heads 😊) and heads full of ideas, we’ve started to work on the game logic. I wrote some methods for countdown, random attack buttons, pop-up window in which user could change the names of tadpoles and some other stuff. Next @Ola, @Mateusz, @Cezary and @MisQlak joined to write a code.

@Mateusz made very well designed animations and methods for health points and health bars and helped with cleaning up the code. He is still sharing his great Java and XML layout tips with us.

@Cezary joined us with good ideas and his main task was to write methods for activating and deactivating players according to whose turn it currently is. He also is great designer, and he drew the beautiful icon for the app and helped with further app design and code cleaning as well.

@Ola - she helped with more advanced work within java. She wrote down code for the random attack much more clearly than we had ourselves. After that everything started to be faster and cleaner. She fixed many bugs and helped with code clean up.

@MisQlak – wrote important methods determining when fight is over and who won. He also made an important dialog window which asks users whether they want to start new game or not. He was writing his code in his car at night, while travelling! It was a big sacrifice from his side. :)

@Beetho – He made an amazing video trailer of our game. He has a lot of talent! He was responsible for creating icons for guns in game as well. Great job!

@Michał Jura joined last, but he helped the most. He have suggested making our java code more object-oriented. He have made more classes, reduced the whole code and made it much more logical and simple to read. He also taught us how to use Github and manage projects.

We are still working on our Mad Tadpoles, and we are still correcting and updating the code and implementing new features. We've become a really good team. Each of us is professional in his (or her ass well!) category. We are taking our tasks seriously, and we are happy to share our knowledge with all of you. Our work has turned into great fun. We can talk for hours about new programming options and we like to laugh and joke together as well.; )

Thanks to @pablom and @jowita who have supported us strongly– maybe they didn’t write any code but they were cheering us every day :)

There are many more such people on the Poland channel. We hope that everyone could use our work and maybe next projects will be bigger, and we will write them in much larger group and it will be even more fun. We encourage everyone to write an application inspired by this course. We think that it will teach you many new things like it have teached us. We are happy to share our small (for now!) experience with all of you. ;)

We are really happy that we are here. Udacity & Google proves to us that programming can be funny and social. :D It’s very interesting journey.

So remember - don't give up, you are not alone on this journey. ;)